Plane travel from Seattle, WA to Lisbon, Portugal

Google Flights is my go-to for looking at options. You can filter by the number of connections.

But do always book with the airline directly.

United, Delta, Air Canada, Lufthansa and BA all have one stop service. Did not find a non-stop.

Just a choice of where you want to change planes and which has the best price for your particular dates.

I've traveled from Seattle to Lisbon on Delta and Air Canada.

Also took a cheap flight to San Francisco, spent the night at a hostel, and flew direct on TAP Air Portugal who sometimes has good deals. Happy with all of my flights. Delta and Air Canada, I had flight changes, but it was during the covid years, so not unexpected.

Sometimes I check out prices from Vancouver to Lisbon on google flights, but I guess it depends how close you are to the border.

I flew Lisbon-Seattle changing in Philadelphia on American.

Your non-stops right to Europe from SeaTac are to London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Dublin and Paris. Sometimes I think there is a nonstop to Helsinki but it doesn't go year-round.

Those will all limit your stopovers to one. I usually pick London or Paris. They're both big airports - so make sure you give yourself enough time to change planes. I look for 3 hours to transfer flights at both of those airports. (Actually I look for closer to 4 hours but I'm super conservative about connections:)

When you explore Google Flights you'll see that there is no info for September 2024 yet. You can take a look for this year's scheduling, but the prices may be very high. Just use your possible equivalent dates and 1 stop or fewer.

First try SEA to LIS round trip. Before selecting anything, scroll down to and click on the calendar called Dates. You will get a grid where your departure and return dates intersect. You can see how moving those dates might change the price, for better or for worse. Click OK on what looks attractive to you. That will take you to the actual flights and their details. Note that the Dates calendar only appears for RT searches.

From there you can select options based on what looks good to you for the total flight times, layover times between flights, potential stop airports, etc. I've rejected more than one layover location or flight pair because the time between arrival and departure was too short for me. Note that the lower prices may also involve longer layovers than you really want.

I also avoid any stop in the US, preferring that if I can't fly nonstop, my one stop be in Europe. Having said that, round trip TAP nonstops from North America and back might be worth flying to a US or Canadian city where that's possible.

If no RT options look good, you could always fly SEA to Europe RT, plan to spend your first or last night or 2 near your arrival and departure location and do an intra-European RT between Lisbon and there. Personally, I would never separate the tickets that way unless I was planning to have at least 1-2 nights on the front end and back ends between them.

For example, in 2019 I flew Delta from SEA to Amsterdam, stayed 3 nights in Haarlem, then flew TAP from AMS to LIS a couple of nights early for the RS Portugal tour, then flew Ryanair from Porto to Barcelona a couple of nights early for the RS Spain tour, then flew Transavia from Seville to AMS and stayed my last night near Schiphol before flying back to SEA. The SEA--AMS--SEA flights were RT nonstop. All the others were 1-way. I found them all on Google Flights

Finally, you can use the Multi-City search option to order your flights in a different way. For my trip last summer, I flew SEA to Dublin via LHR and was able to choose a longer layover between arriving in London and departing for DUB. Because I took the ferry from Belfast back to Liverpool, this was not a true RT itinerary, but my return flight was nonstop LHR to SEA. It was all on the same ticket.

Good luck with your flight planning.

Topcook2 we are head there in Sept for RS tour starting on the 18th. Our plans are to go 1-3 days early. Stop over in Paris on the way back for another RS Tour there. The Goal is a nonstop round trip to Paris and then a local separate flight to Lisbon and Porto to Paris. We love Delta’s Comfort Plus for that 9 hr overnight flight.
I am focused on AirFrance( Delta partner) for now. Looks like best timing is at 6 months. But I will be actively be watching.
PM me if you are willing to share your thoughts.
Don

ps;
Lo’s. Reply above is “right on” we did AMS the same way in 2019 on our way back from BOE. Did a private tour in AMS and Haarlem. Trains and Trams are excellent there.
Don

There are no direct flights Vancouver to Lisbon. Earlier this year my sister flew Vancouver to Lisbon via Montreal (smaller airport versus Toronto) return on Air Canada. AC was cheaper than TAP by quite an amount.

A couple of weeks ago I booked a trip leaving early April '24 from Seattle to Lisbon on British Air; their hub is London Heathrow. My return to Seattle on BA is from Barcelona, again via LHR, early July '24. The so-called open-jaw ticket wasn't appreciably different in price and may have even been slightly cheaper than a regular round-trip ticket returning to Seattle from Lisbon.

Before booking with BA, I compared the offerings on Air Canada, Lufthansa, Delta, and Air France. Each airline has its own hub (London, Toronto or Montreal, Frankfurt, or whatever), and each has its own advantages and disadvantages; ya just gotta sort through the tradeoffs and find the arrangement that works best for you. When I looked, the prices all seemed pretty darn close (BA was slightly better, perhaps due to some sort of sale they had going on). The main pattern I found was that in every case, the outbound flights were reasonably efficient but all the return options seemed to require very long layovers somewhere.

For the record and IMHO, any layover less than two hours is cutting things pretty fine; around three hours should be OK; and four hours should be comfy, if starting to verge on tedious. If you're on BA, for example, and there's a surprise last-minute change of arrival or departure terminal at Heathrow, dealing with all the airport BS and getting from one terminal to the other can make two hours seem like a heartbeat. Heathrow is really huge. Combine a terminal change with a delay in your first flight and you get some real excitement (as I found out on a previous trip back from Spain).

My wife and I are the view that stops are not necessarily bad, as a way to break up a long flight. The overall travel time is more important to us (about 15 hours each way with BA, with two stops going from YVR and one stop coming home).

Topcook2, depending on your itinerary, consider flying open jaw like we did in September, arriving in Porto and then flying home from Faro. Portugal is a relatively long and skinny country and you end up doubling back a lot if you fly in and out of Lisbon which is the middle between Porto and the Algarve.